PEORIA — The nation’s largest civil rights group sued City Hall on Wednesday, alleging its pursuit of the man behind a parody Twitter account that mocked Mayor Jim Ardis was unconstitutional.

“Displeased with the content of the tweets, Defendants (sic) embarked on a plan to shut down the account and identify and punish its creator in violation of his constitutional rights,” begins the 13-page suit filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union in U.S. District Court in Peoria.

ACLU leaders said last month they had taken on the case of Jon Daniel, the creator of @peoriamayor, the short-lived account that was shut down before the police raid to find its creator. The story was covered worldwide.

“The joke of the account was to have my fictional mayor saying things that no one would possibly think that Mayor Jim Ardis would say,” Daniel said. “If the mayor was concerned, all he had to do was tell the public that this was not his account and not his words, rather than involving the police.”

Named in the suit are Ardis; City Manager Patrick Urich and his assistant, Christopher Setti; Sam Rivera, the city’s chief information officer; former Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard, and detectives James Feehan and Steve Hughes Jr.

When asked about the suit Wednesday night at a dinner for the Botswanan delegation, Urich said no one with the city had seen it.

“We don’t normally comment on lawsuits. I don’t think we would say anything officially about that,” he said. “We haven’t seen it. We haven’t been served with anything. It would be premature to have a statement at this point in time.”

The suit states the city’s actions violated Daniel’s First and Fourth Amendment rights.

Daniel is seeking a judge to declare the city violated his Constitutional rights and to issue an injunction blocking such punitive measures in the future. He also wants unspecified monetary damages for “the unlawful suppression of Mr. Daniel’s freedom of expression and the unlawful detention, arrest, searches and seizures” and well as for “defendants’ reckless and callous disregard of Mr. Daniel’s Constitutional rights.”

The suit states the account was started March 9 by Daniel and “juxtaposed the mayor’s clean-cut image with a series of tweets conveying in a crude or vulgar manner an exaggerated preoccupation with sex, drugs, and alcohol, and was a satiric form of expression protected by the First Amendment and the Illinois Constitution.”

By March 11, the suit alleges, the defendants “communicated about the Twitter account, came to a meeting of the minds, and agreed to shut it down and punish its creator.”

Ardis, the suit claims, convinced police to “act within a sense of urgency,” by March 12. Feehan, the suit states, first concluded what was tweeted wasn’t against the law and then erroneously determined it was “false personation.”

State’s Attorney Jerry Brady later refused to prosecute Daniel for the Twitter messages, saying false personation had to be done in person according to state code. It wasn’t illegal, he concluded, to create parody Twitter accounts.

The ACLU is expected to host an 11 a.m. Thursday news conference at the Marriott Pere Marquette announcing the lawsuit. In a news release Wednesday the civil rights group criticized the city’s efforts to go after Daniel, saying political parody is a long-standing tradition in the United States.

“In a number of public statements, the Mayor (sic) and Peoria officials have been unapologetic about their activities,” said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the ACLU of Illinois and the lead attorney on the case. “The only way to hold these government officials accountable is to have a federal court rule that their actions violated the fundamental constitutional rights of our client.”

Daniel’s West Bluff home, which he shared with several others, was raided by police April 15. Initial reports said several police officers stormed into the house but days later, Settingsgaard said there were only a handful of officers, which is a common number given the size of the house and the number of people.

Daniel said police were heavy-handed.

“When I got home, I discovered that my room had been searched — there were drawers open, things were out of place and a box of pictures were dumped out on the floor, a box that included important pictures of my children and my life,” Daniel said. “The next few days were like a blur for me. I was very scared and helpless. I could not sleep. I had a sense of impending doom.”

The incident garnered international attention criticizing the mayor.

Ardis has consistently maintained he contacted the police in mid-March, pointing out the Twitter account, which had only about 50 followers. He told police he would prosecute and then has said he largely stayed out of the fray as the police investigated, using multiple search warrants to gain information from Twitter, Google and Comcast about the identities of the account owners. But a series of emails obtained by the Journal Star through the Freedom of Information Act shows Ardis was involved in the investigation throughout.

ACLU Suit

Andy Kravetz can be reached at 686-3283 or akravetz@pjstar.com. Follow him on Twitter @andykravetz.

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